Over many years as a shamanic practitioner, I have gained great appreciation of the ancient traditions of ritual and ceremony. It is important that we acknowledge, celebrate and honour significant events in our lives, witnessed by friends and family. These events include marriage, handfasting, vow renewal, child naming, death, grief, or other important milestones such as moving house, a new job, a new business, a new piece of land or a new country of residence.

Francis Weller writes, “Simply said, ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation.”

In my next posting I will describe some particular rituals that we can all use in our daily lives to assist us, but here I want to talk about some potential scientific justification for these.

I am going to introduce two categories of ritual. Category 1 rituals are those that help us to connect with the inforealm, (Cosmic Consciousness, the Knowing Field, the holographic universe, the Akashic records), assisting the right-brain in its wide-ranging intuitive, empathic, emotional, non-verbal activities, and loosening the hold of the Default Mode Network, or the censoring and judging area of the brain. [1]

When we want to get into the correct brainwave state to optimally ask for and receive information from the inforealm, it is important to set the scene, creating a safe and sacred space for our work in which we clearly state our intentions.

So, if you are going to engage in a ritual it is important to collect the right tools, dress up, get all the necessary bits and pieces together. Engage with the ritual in your mind, your body, your clothes, your actions, your thoughts. Be fully in it. You are honouring something sacred and often ancient with the ritual, creating an energy field that beams out and connects in the inforealm, resonating with all those who have done that same ritual in the past, calling in the ancestors, calling for help from the wider nonlocal consciousness. You need to make that energetic field as strong as possible to achieve the maximum resonance in the inforealm.

Category 2 rituals are those that help us to connect the right-brain and left-brain. Rituals can act as powerful transmission and anchoring methods between the energetic and the physical. To manifest the mythical and archetypical information we receive from our journeying (which arrives into the right brain) into our daily lives, requires that the information is communicated to the narrowly focused, verbal, compartmentalised and organising left brain.

Rituals can set the scene for helping us to change our perceptual state, taking us out of our usual stories and belief systems into a more ancient world of archetypes and myths, thus helping us to engage the neuroplastic potential of the brain to change and form new attractor pathways. Remember - when we see the same thing but from a different perspective or a different state of mind, we activate different parts of the cortex and apply different mathematical transformations to the space-time flux of information emanating from that which we observe, resulting in a different form, a different memory within the brain.

So rituals can help us to reprogramme the limbic attractors of our brains, creating new neural pathways and new memories outside the old stories, helping to embody what we have received in our right brains from the cosmic consciousness (category 1 ritual) into the four-dimensional, logical, left brain of everyday waking reality. (category 2 ritual).

From Francis Weller again, “We don’t want to come out of ritual the same as we entered. We step into ritual ground in the hope of being changed.”

[1] I am using the conventional right brain, left brain terminology here for convenience and brevity. In many people the left and right brain functions appear to be reversed. Apologies if you are one of these people, and please do not be dogmatic on left and right as you read this. Both/and thinking, not either/or.